A literary blog for Orange County, California
and the border regions of Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside.
Cited as "Best Literary Blog" by Orange Coast magazine: "a one-stop shop for book-minded cyber-crawlers."

Thursday, December 27, 2012

The Morning Reading: "The Earth will be going on a long time"

from Sacramental Acts~ Kenneth Rexroth

The Earth will be going on a long timeBefore it finally freezes;Men will be on it; they will take names,Give their deeds reasons.We will be here onlyAs chemical constituents—A small franchise indeed.Right now we have lives,Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feastOf birth, let us bring to each otherThe gifts brought once west through deserts—The precious metal of our mingled hair,The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—Let us celebrate the dailyRecurrent nativity of love,The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,While the earth rolls away under usInto unknown snows and summers,Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

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About Rebel Girl

Rebel Girl takes her nom-de-plume from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, labor activist and subject of the Woody Guthrie song, "Rebel Girl." In real life, she is Lisa Alvarez, a mild-mannered professor of English at Irvine Valley College and co-director of the summer writers workshops at the Community of Writers. Her stories and essays have appeared most recently in the "American Book Review," Green Mountains Review," "Santa Monica Review" and in the anthology "Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America" (Norton). She teaches creative writing at Irvine Valley College. You can contact her via ldalvarez@juno.com